Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father

by Christa Faust

  Peter tugged at the Sig, but lost his grip. It clattered against the cracked pavement, bouncing into some shadows near the wall.

  The pistol lost, Peter focused on keeping Big Eddie from shooting him with the cannon in his hand. He took an elbow to the face, but managed to dislodge Big Eddie’s .357, sending the gun skittering across the uneven floor.

  “Julia, get out of here,” Peter yelled. “Get the cops!”

  He only hoped she’d be able to do so before Little Eddie knew what was happening.

  But instead of running to the exit, she ran toward the discarded gun, scooped it up, and continued toward the Englishman. Little Eddie wouldn’t open up on Peter as long as there was a chance he might hit his father, but there wasn’t any such risk if he took a shot at Julia.

  Momentarily distracted, Peter got Big Eddie’s knee to the groin. The mobster shoved hard, pushing Peter away from him. He rolled on the floor, scrambled to stand up, and a wave of nausea swept through him.

  It was over.

  But he was damned if he was going to die lying down.

  The shotgun roared in Little Eddie’s hands, at the same time as Julia fired the .357. Gunshots so close together that Peter couldn’t tell who was shooting at whom. It took him a stunned second to realize that he wasn’t dead. Then he turned, and saw Little Eddie slump to the floor, his enormous girth turned into dead weight.

  Big Eddie screamed and ran to his son.

  Peter expected to find Julia dead, but instead she stood over McCoy with the .357 smoking in her hand. The Englishman lay face down on the ground, his back a meaty crater where Little Eddie’s Benelli had blown a hole the size of a soccer ball. Peter blinked. In the dim light of the tunnel, the man’s blood looked oddly silver.

  “We need to call the police,” he said. “Have them get a bomb squad down here. Disarm this thing.”

  “You go ahead and do that, Peter,” she said, kicking the Benelli into the shadows of the tunnel, far out of Big Eddie’s reach. “I’m not sticking around for it.” She leveled the gun at his chest, moved to the control panel, and slipped the vial of virus into her pocket.

  “I’ve got what I came for,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” he replied. But he thought he was beginning to understand.

  “I’m sorry, Peter,” she said. “I didn’t expect any of this to happen. You have to believe me. If McCoy hadn’t caught me outside of Doctor Westerson’s house, none of this would have happened.”

  “You’d have gotten away scot-free.”

  “I would have, yes. And this time I will.”

  “You bitch,” Big Eddie screamed. He held his dead son, blood covering his hands, soaking into his clothes. Little Eddie’s formerly pretty blue eyes stared sightless at the ceiling. “You killed my boy.”

  “Goodbye, Peter,” she said. “Don’t follow me. I don’t want to have to kill you, too.”

  She started to back away from him.

  Peter thought furiously, trying to find some way to get her to stop.

  “The police will find out about the virus,” he said.

  “They’ll take it and they’ll study it. And they’ll make more of it. Do you want that out there in the world? Your life’s work? You’ll be a pariah, and somebody else will get the credit.”

  Julia paused, considering his words.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s too dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  “Exactly,” Peter said. “Help me get rid of it. The police…”

  “We don’t need the police,” she said, stepping over to the control panel and shoving McCoy’s body out of the way. She examined the panel until she found the switch she was looking for—flipped it, and a readout showed five minutes. Then it began counting down. She reached under the panel, finding the wire leading to the switch, and yanked it out, rendering it useless.

  “Julia, are you insane? You’ll kill thousands of people.”

  “I’m not releasing the virus, Peter. You heard McCoy.

  This thing’s wired with enough thermite to destroy it, and turn this whole place into slag. I’m leaving now. If you follow me I’ll shoot you. When the countdown reaches three minutes you can leave. That should give both of us enough time to get out safely.” She looked at Big Eddie crying over Little Eddie’s corpse. “Even him.”

  She backed away again, and started up the stairs.

  “At least answer me this,” Peter said. “Is it true? What McCoy said? About Walter’s lab? About Carla?”

  She smiled at him, pausing at the doorway.

  “A girl’s got to have her secrets,” she said, and she disappeared from sight.

  Peter stopped himself from running after her. By the time he got up there she’d be long gone. Or she’d shoot him.

  That was fine. He’d find her. He knew exactly where she was going.

  Peter looked back at the device, the clock counting down the seconds. There was no way he’d get the switch re-wired in time to shut it off. And did he want to? This way, nobody else would get the virus, and thousands of people would be saved.

  He gave it another ten seconds before heading up the stairs. As he stepped through the doorway, he heard Big Eddie’s voice, bellowing behind him, followed by pounding footsteps. So he ran, taking the stairs two at a time and flying up the ladder like he had demons at his heels.

  Worse than demons, he had Big Eddie.

  When he popped up through the open manhole, Peter threw himself into the gutter, sliding behind a parked car as if he was stealing home base. Seconds later flames belched forth from the tunnel, and the ground lurched beneath him. He covered his head with his hands.

  When he dared to sneak a look at the chaos in the street, he saw a crowd of anxious Brooklynites milling around the manhole. A pair of hipster Samaritans were trying to help a guy slumped against the power company truck. The guy’s bald head was burned bright pink and there was a raccoon mask of soot on his furious face.

  Big Eddie. Still alive and kicking, the hard old bastard. Luckily, he was distracted by the hipsters, giving Peter an opportunity to melt, unnoticed, into the crowd.

  DUSK AT REIDEN LAKE.

  It was an innocuous place, drowsy and lost in time. Not really big enough or scenic enough to attract out-of-state visitors. Mostly kids with nothing better to do, who wanted an unsupervised place to drink and make out, and the occasional lone older man in a splintery canoe who didn’t really care that the fish were small and scarce.

  The beach was narrow and rocky, the water murky and cold even in the summertime. A cracked rowboat had been abandoned belly-up on the far end of the beach. There were a few modest cabins clustered around the northern end, most of which seemed to be empty this time of year. If Peter remembered correctly, one of them belonged to some relative of his father—an uncle maybe.

  But like all of Peter’s memories of this place, it felt foggy and jarringly incomplete, as if he’d made it up or seen it on some television show. There was nothing about it that wasn’t utterly mundane, yet it felt profoundly haunted, pregnant with mystery and secrets.

  Like the scene of an unsolved murder.

  I’ve got to stop reading so many cheap crime novels, he told himself.

  Peter ditched the stolen car on the overlook and ran down to the beach. There was Julia, standing in the water up to her hips, a loaded syringe in her hand.

  “Julia!” he called out.

  She spun toward him, eyes wide.

  “I thought you might follow me,” she said.

  “I had to,” he said taking a step closer to the water. “I need to know what the hell is going on. What are you trying to do? You’ve done nothing but lie to me from the minute we met, and now I want some answers, dammit!”

  “I understand,” she said softly. “Of course you want answers. About your life. Your childhood. About why you feel so out of place, no matter where you go. We’re alike in many ways, Peter. Outsiders. Strangers. Alone even in a crowded room. The difference is that
you chose to run away and keep on running, even though no matter how far you run, you can never get away from your own head.

  “Me, I chose to do something about it.”

  She leaned in, eyes glittering.

  “You want to know who you really are, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I know who I am,” Peter said.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  The question echoed, unanswered across the water. Peter clenched his fists.

  Do I?

  Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he? There was never any doubt in his mind.

  Except there was. A deeply rooted doubt, all tangled up in that strange time when he’d been so sick as a child. When things seemed to get so mixed up in his head, and everyone was acting like nothing was different when everything obviously was.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Peter asked, taking a step closer to the edge of the water.

  “Let me show you,” Julia replied.

  She plunged the syringe into the crook of her arm. His hand jerked forward instinctively, then he stopped. It was too late.

  Nothing happened for several seconds. The two of them just stood there in the cool, quiet evening while a single optimistic cricket and the soft lapping of the lake water against the shore provided the only soundtrack.

  Then, something strange started to happen. The air behind her started to shimmer and split open like a wound. She turned toward this anomaly and let the syringe slip from her fingers.

  “It’s working!” she whispered.

  “It’s like what happened at the hotel,” he said, squinting against the curious light. It was growing larger. “What is it?”

  “The way home,” she said, turning back to face him and extending her hand. “Come with me.”

  He looked down at her hand, and over at the pulsing gateway that seemed so alien, and yet at the same time so familiar. There was a cold coil of nausea beginning to churn in his belly, and he felt as if he was starting to lose his grip on what he thought was real. None of this was possible, yet it was happening before his disbelieving eyes. This, and of all the impossible things he’d witnessed over the past few days, left him feeling profoundly unsure.

  He looked back at Julia’s hand. Hadn’t he been searching for answers his entire life? Could he live with himself if he turned away from the understanding he’d been craving all these years?

  He unfisted his own right hand, and stretched it out toward her.

  Just before they touched, he noticed something starting to happen to her hand. At first it was the proportions of her fingers that seemed slightly off. The index finger seemed too long, while the middle finger was too short and thick. The pinkie finger was age-spotted with the swollen knuckles of an older woman. She didn’t seem to be mutating out of control like the virus’s previous victims. She just seemed to be shifting into a strange jigsaw composite of different people.

  Patches of her skin were dark while others were light. Some had freckles, or scars, or thick hair. When he looked up at her face, he was amazed and horrified to see a morphing kaleidoscope of varied features, both male and female.

  “What?” she asked, her patchwork brows furrowed.

  “I think—” he said, gesturing to his own face with a kind of inarticulate flapping. “I mean, something is…”

  Before he could find the words to break it to her that she seemed to be transforming into a hundred different people at the same time, something started happening to that unnatural slash in the air behind her. It began clenching, tightening up and narrowing like reluctant lips.

  She noticed the direction of his gaze and turned to look.

  “No!” she cried.

  Before Peter could process this new development, she flung herself through the shimmering rift.

  Then she and the rift were gone.

  Julia felt an uncanny power fluctuating and flowing through every inch of her body as she spun away from Peter and dove into the gateway. Everything seemed to turn inside out, thrusting her headfirst through a thousand improbable supernovas, all simultaneously.

  Then she was suddenly plunged into chilly green water. Before she was able to orient herself and figure up from down in the murky shallows, rough hands gripped her arms and her clothes and hauled her, sputtering, to her feet.

  She shook her head to clear it, and looked around at her saviors. They were a dead-eyed pair, pale and utterly expressionless. Both male and both in their mid-thirties, one blond and one dark. Unremarkable, except for their total lack of anything resembling human emotion.

  There were two other people there, too. One was female and standing directly in front of Julia, knee deep in water. She was pretty, with wide-set dark eyes and honey-blond hair, but she was just as cold and inhuman as her male compatriots.

  The other was a third male, with light hair and blue eyes, standing on the shore. All four were dressed in what looked like black military fatigues or maybe SWAT uniforms.

  Are they soldiers of some sort? she wondered.

  The blue-eyed man on the shore was the only one of the four wearing something that resembled a human expression. Unfortunately, it was a hostile smirk that didn’t bode well for Julia.

  Although everything looked just as it had before she entered the gateway, she had to assume that she’d made it through to the alternate universe that Doctor Bishop had written about in his journal. Peter was nowhere to be seen, and these grim soldiers were here in his place. But she hadn’t been expecting this sort of welcome committee—or any welcome at all, for that matter—and her mind was racing, desperate to come up with something that would enable her to talk her way out of this situation.

  That’s when she noticed the skin of her arms was behaving strangely, flickering like a rapid-paced slideshow of different skin tones and textures. The virus wasn’t supposed to have any mutagenic effects on an epileptic host, but an unexpected physical side effect of some kind was definitely occurring. It seemed odd that she didn’t feel anything unusual, physically speaking, other than a slight adrenaline buzz. Could the fluctuations in her skin be hallucinations brought on by the symbiotic assimilation of the virus inside her brain?

  But as fascinating as this effect might be, she had more pressing issues with which to deal.

  “Who,” she managed to whisper. “Who are you?”

  The woman raised an unfamiliar gun and pointed it at Julia.

  “Not in the head,” the smirking man said. “The brain must remain intact.”

  The woman nodded, lowered her aim, and shot Julia in the heart.

  * * *

  Thomas Newton watched the subject sag lifelessly in the arms of the hybrid soldiers, bleeding out into the murky green water. He had a passing surge of discomfort, imagining contamination and rampant plague that might result from the viral load in the subject’s blood.

  But Jones had assured him that his newest re-engineered strain of the virus was neither as hearty nor as deadly as the first. It would die off within seconds of being exposed to the hostile environment outside the host organism’s body.

  “Get her into the cryo-freezer,” he snapped. “Pronto.”

  The hybrid soldiers followed his command, hauling the still-shifting body ashore and carrying it quickly and efficiently to the back of the truck parked up on the bluff. The roll-up was open, the freezer ready and waiting to accept the specimen.

  Newton couldn’t imagine how something so obviously wild and unstable could really be the key to creating a new wave of fully organic shifters, soldiers that would outperform their current mechanical hybrids, and tip the balance in the war between the universes. After all, it was clear that the subject had been unable to control her shifting ability—indeed, she barely seemed aware that it was occurring.

  His soldiers needed to be finely calibrated and perfectly controlled, able to pass without notice among their unsuspecting human targets. Still, he himself was just a foot soldier in this war, and it wasn’t his place to question the orders of his
superiors.

  Once the body of the subject was interred in the cryo-freezer for transport to the lab, Newton closed the roll-up door on the back of the truck and rapped on it to signal the driver.

  He watched without comment as the driver put the vehicle in gear and drove away.

  * * *

  Jones watched one of a bank of monitors on the desk. The image was of Reiden Lake through cameras he had installed to watch for Julia. He would be collecting them soon, since they were no longer needed, though it didn’t much matter if he did. No one would find them, just as no one had found them in Bangkok, Hartford, the Ambassador Hotel, or in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel beneath New York.

  Of course, that last one hadn’t needed to be collected. It was incinerated when the thermite destroyed everything in the tunnel. Just as he’d planned it.

  Jones switched off the last of the monitors. As secret lairs went, this one wasn’t so bad. He had everything he needed, and things were going according to plan. Oh, there were some adjustments he would need to make, but not many. With Doctor Lachaux’s mutated brain in his possession, he had exactly what he needed to take his work further than anyone had dreamed.

  A noise behind him caught his attention. He spun slowly in the office chair.

  An electronic typewriter—a Selectric 251—hummed to life. The hammers began striking the crisp, white paper in the machine, yet there was no one at the keys. Well, no one on his side of the fence, at least. In the small mirror set up next to the typewriter, Jones could see the keys move. It was a fascinating process to observe.

  Hit a key over there, make a letter over here. He watched the message take shape on the crisp, white paper in the machine. A message between worlds. He read the news, the import of it sinking in.

  He smiled.

  Another airport—the first place Peter went when he wasn’t sure what to do next.

  This particular one was New York’s familiar JFK airport, and he sat slumped in a long row of uncomfortable seats facing the window, with a laptop balanced on his knees. He had been cleaning out the accumulated junk from one of his many email accounts, but found himself just staring at the screen, brain idling in a kind of dull, blurry neutral.