Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  The eruptions sent the workmen running back the way they came, swearing or praying—or maybe both. The young man in the bell-bottoms ran the other way, crying and covering his wavy blond hair as the cars blazed all around him.

  “It wasn’t me!” he wailed. “I swear it wasn’t me!”

  Bell sat up and stared after him, shaking his head.

  “Amazing,” he said. “Poltergeist activity, pyrokinesis, phantom wounding, gamma bursts. All that potential power locked inside ordinary human beings, just waiting to be harnessed or released. We haven’t even begun to reach our full potential as a race.”

  “Or our full potential as mass murderers.” Walter turned on Bell, furious. “We have unleashed monsters. Turned people’s own minds against them. Allowed frightened innocents to lash out at the pain of the world with the strength of gods! This is a nightmare!”

  “Yes,” Bell said, “but imagine if one could harness these powers of the mind, at the same time as we were amplifying them. If the formula could be perfected and used in a more controlled setting, perhaps with younger subjects whose minds are still open. Think how powerful the human race could become.”

  “Too powerful,” Walter said. “There would be a psychic apocalypse that would tear apart the very fabric our universe.”

  Nina stood close by.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “What about the band? What’s happening to them?”

  Bell laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re as safe as they can be, in the warehouse. It’s built to withstand tons of damage. And the way they were playing, I doubt they have any idea what’s happening out here.”

  She nodded. In the distance, police sirens were wailing. Someone had called in the fires. She looked down the street in the direction the blond man had run.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’d better try to calm that poor guy down before he blows up any more...”

  Crash!

  She stopped as a section of the wooden fence that surrounded the shipyard smashed flat to the sidewalk. They looked up to see what might follow.

  An old boat, rusted and wrecked, with its engine missing and its hull smashed full of jagged holes, was hovering a few feet above the ground and slowly drifting as if caught in a lazy current. It had knocked down a section of the fence, and was now drifting into the next section, splintering the boards and snapping them off at ground level.

  Bell swore.

  “What now?” Walter asked.

  Walter and Nina stared as they saw that the boat was not alone. Behind it, in the dark of the shipyard, other huge shapes floated and spun, all caught in the same inexorable current—propellers, anchors, heavy chains, rusted boilers, engines. It looked like a slow motion cyclone, with all the junk circling the center of the yard.

  An army of terrified rats was fleeing down the street like a squirming brown river. Walter watched in horror as several straggler rodents were swept up into the whirlpool, squeaking and defecating in fear as they sailed through the air end over thrashing end.

  “Oh, God,” said Nina. “It’s expanding.”

  Just as she said it, the rusted out hull of a fishing trawler mashed into the wall of the welding shop next door. It glanced off again just as slowly as it had hit, and only dislodged a few bricks, but Walter saw that Nina was right. The entire whirlpool was getting wider, and more and more junk was going to start smashing into the surrounding buildings.

  Walter started across the street.

  “Someone’s in there, doing this,” he said. “We have to stop them. We have to bring them down.”

  Bell caught his arm and tried to pull him back.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked. “We could be crushed! We have to get out of here.”

  Walter turned on him.

  “You remember last time?” he asked. “You said it wasn’t our fault because we didn’t know what would happen. This time we did know what would happen, and we did it anyway. It’s our fault, Belly! The radiation. The fires. We have to do what we can!” He turned to face Nina. “Wait around the corner and warn the firefighters about the radiation in the alley. Say you saw a man with a weird kind of bomb, or a mushroom cloud, or something like that.”

  “A weird bomb?” Nina rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that sounds believable.”

  “Look I don’t care what you tell them,” Walter responded, “as long as you make them understand that the area must be cordoned off. I am going into that yard.”

  Walter wrenched his arm out of Bell’s grip and hurried across the street. Nina gave Bell a hard look.

  “Alright, Walter,” Bell groaned, then he raised his voice. “Alright. I’m coming.” He backed away from Nina. “Go home as soon as you talk to the firemen. We’ll meet back at your place.”

  “Let’s just hope that my car isn’t on fire,” she said with a look.

  24

  Allan breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped out of an underground parking garage. The woman had been dealt with, and already the sparks were subsiding.

  This had not been a Zodiac killing. It had been another act of necessity. Not that he minded taking the extra lives, but he felt as if his talents were ultimately being wasted. The bum. The Chinese man at the warehouse. They just weren’t up to his usual standards. They would be reported as a simple street crime, nothing more. Not even his good friend Special Agent Iverson would know it had been him.

  At least he had been able to share Desiree with Iverson. He’d written a long, detailed letter describing all the special moments, and speculating how many other human cockroaches had been taken out by the aftereffects of his little one-night stand. And when the time was right, he would write a letter to Iverson about Miss Nina Sharp and her little friends.

  From that moment on, there would be no one in this world who would be able to stop him.

  He jogged back to the street where the rehearsal studio it was located, hoping he would have a chance to reconnect with the Reiden Lake boys and Miss Sharp. He was suddenly desperate to see them.

  He felt like a man in love.

  There were sirens on the wind, but still far away. He needed to find the hippies before they fled the scene.

  He stopped as he came around the corner. Only a moment earlier, when he had run from the cop, the street had been dark, lit only by the glow of a minor fire down the block. Now the whole street was ablaze with light and thick with black smoke. At least eight cars were burning like torches along both sides. What had happened? Had the boys done this? How could they? No, they wouldn’t have had the time.

  What the hell was going on?

  Then he saw them through the flames—two of them at least, the two boys, their silhouettes entering the shipyard across the street from the rehearsal studio. He increased his pace, then slowed again as a portion of the shipyard fence splintered and toppled onto the sidewalk. Something in the smoke had pushed through. Something large and dark. Was there someone in there operating some kind of wrecking equipment?

  The smoke cleared for a moment, and he saw an old shell of a boat, spinning in a lazy circle, like a leaf in a river, as it floated five feet off the ground, flattening the fence as it went. More psychic disturbance. These fools were causing more chaos than he ever had.

  That thought should have made him feel jealous or competitive, but instead it increased his desire to play with them. Finally, he had worthy opponents. Not equals, of course, but prey worth chasing. Prolonging the game, until they could share the exquisite moments of their own inevitable deaths.

  He went on, more cautious now, and peered through a broken gap in the fence. The entire contents of the shipyard seemed to have lifted up into a slow swirl, like a cloud of rattle-trap asteroids circling some invisible sun.

  No. Not invisible, just hidden. Whatever the gravitational center of this solar system of junk, it looked like it was inside a rusty airstream trailer that appeared to serve the yard as an office. And just as Allan suspected, his quarry were ma
king their way toward it, picking fearfully through the moving maze of floating constellations of rubbish.

  Allan slipped inside the fence and started after them.

  * * *

  Walter edged ahead and to the left as a bathtub started to float over his head, then he slipped between a chain fall hoist and a fork lift that looked as if they were dancing together. Bell tiptoed after him, holding his breath as if the slightest sound or movement would bring the whole impossible whirlpool crashing down around them.

  There were smaller objects in the air, as well— batteries, springs, gas tanks, a coil of rope undulating like a snake. It was surreal and beautiful and terrifying all at once. A defiance of gravity and logic and science.

  Walter wished that they might be experiencing these events under different circumstances, fascinated as he was by the hidden secrets of the mind that this amazing phenomenon suggested. Secrets that had to be explored, and he could imagine spending the rest of his life digging deeper into those mysteries. If only the risks weren’t so dire. If only the potential for destruction and death wasn’t so terrifyingly clear.

  The rounded, silver airstream trailer stood just ahead, alone in a circle of empty air like the eye of a hurricane. Walter stepped up to the door with Bell at his side, each man letting out a relieved breath as they left the floating maze behind.

  There were sounds coming from inside the trailer as Walter reached for the handle. An odd, arrhythmic thumping, and tortured grunting. Walter pulled open the door and peered inside. It was dim, but not black. The blue light of a TV flickered from the far end of the trailer, revealing that things were floating in there, too. Papers, books, lamps, pens, pots and pans, a pack of cigarettes. The calendars and posters of bikini girls on the walls rippled and flapped as if they were in a high wind, though the air was dead and still.

  The thumping grew louder.

  Walter stepped up into the trailer, pushing a floating stapler out of the way, and looked toward the back, toward the light and the noise. He stopped. The TV was on its side pointing at the left wall, a table overturned beside it. On the floor, bathed in the cathode glow, was a man.

  He was an older black man with a round jowly face, dressed in coveralls and a knit cap. His back was arched and rigid, and he was twitching as if he’d touched a live wire, with froth bubbling between rigid lips and his eyes wide and staring. The thumping was his right heel kicking spasmodically against the linoleum, as his other limbs twitched and jerked.

  “He appears to be in the midst of a grand mal seizure,” Walter told Bell over his shoulder. One of the man’s flailing hands was encircled by an engraved medical alert bracelet featuring the Hippocratic snake and staff, and the word EPILEPTIC in large red letters.

  Bell squeezed in on his left.

  “Do you think his epilepsy might have been triggered by our... event?”

  “Undoubtedly,” Walter said, nodding. “And the electrical storm going on in his head is manifesting in the physical world as that psychic cyclone outside.” He started through the debris, ducking through flocks of flapping paper and slowly spinning pens. “But a seizure usually lasts less than a minute. No more than two. We saw that car flatten the fence at least four minutes ago.”

  “A feedback loop,” Bell offered. “The psychic pulse triggered the fit which triggered a larger psychic burst which in turn...”

  Walter knelt by the man.

  “What can we do for him?” he asked.

  Bell knelt beside Walter.

  “Nothing,” Bell said. “Except maybe turn him on his side so he doesn’t choke on all that drool, and make sure he’s not going to bang his head on anything.”

  “Ah, yes. We can do that. Although...” Walter looked up at Bell, uneasy. “I’m concerned about what happens when he comes out of it. Do the things in the air settle gently to the ground, or do they drop all at once? There could be a lot of damage. Someone could get hurt.”

  “Not much we can do about that, either,” Bell replied.

  * * *

  Allan stepped under a floating boat hull and into the clearer air around the trailer. Only a few smaller things—wrenches, pipe fittings, and beer cans—drifted there. He glanced behind as the sound of sirens grew louder. It seemed so unfair that capricious circumstance would force his hand like this, but it was becoming increasingly clear that it would be best to take out the Reiden Lake boys right now.

  They were too dangerous and could not be allowed to live. All the other connections to his old life, his old world, had been severed, all except these two. With them gone, the final tie would be cut, and he would be free.

  But all the arbitrary killings were wearing on him, making him feel like a butcher, rather than an artist. This was not his destiny, not who he was meant to be.

  Should he kill them? Or not?

  He crept closer to the trailer door.

  * * *

  Walter put his hands on the man’s shoulder and hip, and pushed to rock him over onto his side. His body was so rigid that it was easier than he expected, and the man nearly flopped face first onto the floor. Walter grabbed awkwardly at him to save his teeth, and touched his hand—flesh to flesh.

  All at once every floating object in the trailer dropped straight to the ground.

  Bell gasped, and began to speak.

  He was drowned out by a thunderous crash that shook the trailer. Walter thought he heard someone outside let out a stifled cry, but he couldn’t be sure. A bookshelf full of ring binders tipped forward and dumped its load on him, and the battering he received made every other sensation take a back seat.

  After a few seconds of coughing and brushing off and sitting up, Bell squinted around, waving at the clouds of dust.

  “So much for gently lowering anything to the ground.”

  Walter looked toward the door.

  “I thought I heard someone outside,” he said. “We should check. They might be...”

  He cut off as the sirens they had been hearing in the background suddenly pushed to the foreground. They could see flashing red and blue lights through the windows of the trailer, and heard the slamming of doors.

  “Or perhaps...”

  “Wha... what the hell was that?”

  They both looked down. The confused watchman was looking up at them, an expression on his face that was equal parts fear and embarrassment.

  “I had another one of my fits again,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

  Bell nodded, then shot another glance at the window.

  “Er, yes, sir,” Walter said. “I’m afraid so. But you’re fine now, and there is an ambulance here to help you. We’ll just go let them know where you are.”

  “Yes,” Bell said, edging toward the door. “We’ll send them your way.” He turned. “Come on, Walter.”

  Walter didn’t want to leave the man alone. In fact, he wanted to question him, ask him about the experience. But trying to give the police a rational sounding explanation for what had happened here would be an exercise in futility. So he gave a guilty salute to the befuddled watchman, then edged around him.

  “Right behind you,” he called after his friend.

  * * *

  Allan hurried away down the street, police sirens bouncing off the surrounding walls and painting the night in a wash of blue and red. He had been less than three feet from the trailer door and about to reach for the knob when all of the mysteriously suspended objects around him had suddenly lost their animation and dropped to the ground.

  A large jagged chunk of rusty metal the size of a washing machine had dropped down an inch from his toes. So close that he could feel the wind of its passage. If he’d been reaching for the knob, his right arm would have been crushed, broken, or perhaps even severed.

  He got the message. He was being impulsive, over-eager. He had been thinking of deviating from the plan. And look where that kind of thinking got him.

  He would still have his special moment with those two, and with Miss Nina Sharp, as long as he s
tuck to the plan. He just needed to be patient. Let them make plans of their own. Watch it all play out, and act accordingly.

  25

  They got back to Nina’s house just as the sun was coming up. Pregnant Abby was curled up on a couch, dozing with Cat-Mandu. Looking down at her, Walter felt a pang of guilt for involving the father of her child in all this madness.

  The three of them dragged themselves up the stairs to Nina’s room, mentally and physically exhausted.

  “So what’s our next move?” Nina asked.

  “Next move?” Walter ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know about you, but my next move is to collapse from exhaustion.”

  “But what I want to know,” Bell said, “is how did he find us?”

  Walter shuddered. He’d been thinking the same thing, and wasn’t happy with the conclusions he’d come to.

  “There’s been something bothering me since last night,” Walter said. “But you know how bad my memory is, so I just told myself I was wrong.”

  “What?” Bell asked.

  “Well,” Walter said, “I’m pretty sure we never told Iverson about Reiden Lake.”

  Bell got it. His eyes went wide.

  “The classified ad,” he said.

  “It said ‘regarding events at Reiden Lake,’ right?” Walter asked. “But we never told Iverson, or any other authorities about where the initial trip took place. There’s only one other person who knows that.”

  “The killer,” Bell said.

  “How could we have been so stupid?” Walter said.

  “You know what this means,” Bell said. “This means he’s probably following us. He may be watching us right now!”

  “But if he’s been watching us all this time, why doesn’t he just kill us?”

  “Look,” Nina said. “It’s obvious that he wants to toy with you—with us. That’s his thing, right? Psychological torture, mind games, taunting letters.”