Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  Bell scooped up the alpha wave generator and slipped it into the canvas messenger bag he’d used to bring it in.

  “But this is excellent.” Walter grabbed one of Bell’s arms with his right hand and one of Nina’s with the left, and dragged them toward the door, away from the wall of throbbing sound emanating from the happy and oblivious musicians. “Thirty-eight seconds, even twenty-eight, would surely be enough time to goad our quarry through the rift. All we have to do is gather another similarly sized test group.” He shouldered open the door and shoved Nina and Bell through. “Then lure the killer to the spot as the trip reaches its—” he slammed the door “—peak.”

  The shouted word peak echoed down the street, way too loud now that the music was muffled by the closed door.

  “Is that all?” Nina said, raising a sarcastic eyebrow. “And how do you propose that we set it up? Who do you suggest we...”

  Walter frowned, held up a finger, and looked around.

  “Does anyone else smell smoke?” he asked.

  They scanned the length of the block, and spotted flickering orange light playing over the brick and corrugated metal skins of the buildings at the far end of the block. The night was suddenly thick with the stink of burning plastic, and filled with frightened shouts. From the shipyard across the street came a sound like bridge cables twisting in a high wind.

  “Oh, dear.” Walter closed his eyes. “Not again.”

  “I thought there weren’t any people in this neighborhood?” Bell said.

  “There weren’t supposed to be,” Nina said. “Not on this block, anyway. But if more trippers equaled a longer duration for the gate, maybe it also equaled a wider psychic blast radius.”

  “Did you notice the tendrils spreading out from the edges of the gateway?” Walter asked.

  “Yes!” Bell replied. “Clearly that’s the moment when the psychic bleed through begins. Nina, do you remember how long the gate was open before the tendrils became visible?”

  A scream from an alley three buildings to the left cut off her reply.

  “Get ’em off me!” A high, tremulous voice echoed through the alley. “Get ’em off!”

  Walter and Bell exchanged a look and ran to the mouth of the narrow passageway. A few yards in, a homeless man was crabbing backward out of his bedroll as if there was a snake in it, and pressing against the dumpster that had been serving as a shelter.

  “Get ’em off!” he screeched.

  “The DTs?” Bell suggested, brow arched. “Not uncommon in alcoholics.”

  Walter took a few cautious steps closer to the squirming man.

  “No,” he said. “Look!”

  Under the harsh glare of a security light, he could see the man’s naked, grime-caked torso was covered in what looked like rat bites. He was bleeding from more than a dozen crescent-shaped punctures.

  Walter ran and grabbed the bottom of the roll and pulled, helping the man shuck clear of the bedding, then threw it away and knelt beside the man.

  “Are you alright?” Walter asked. “What was biting you? Was it rats?”

  But the man was still twisting and swatting at nothing.

  “Get ’em off me!” he cried. “Get ’em off me!”

  As Walter watched in horror, more bites appeared in the man’s flesh, bloody holes torn in his arms, belly, and neck, though there was nothing visible attacking him. It was as if he were being savaged by an invisible swarm of some sort.

  “Maybe it really is the DTs,” Bell murmured. “Only they’ve been psychically amplified by our experiment.”

  “Dreams made flesh,” Walter whispered, half to himself. “But what can we do?”

  “I...” Bell shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “But this is our fault, Belly,” Walter said. “You can’t deny it this time. It’s our fault, and our responsibility.”

  Walter buried his head in his hands.

  “This is terrible,” he said. “Terrible.”

  * * *

  From the shadows of the alley across the street, Allan peered through his rifle sight, and watched the agitated group. He had several clear and easy shots, including the lovely redhead, Miss Nina Sharp, but he didn’t take them. After all, it would be completely pointless to kill them now. They would die like slaughterhouse cows, too stupid to understand what that big bolt gun was for.

  No, he wanted time to taunt them, time to play with them and show them who had the upper hand. But Nina and his two special friends were alone now. No witnesses, except for the crazed bum.

  Allan was a man who liked to stick to the plan no matter what. Yet here was such a tempting opportunity. He could kill the tall one first, to show the other two he meant business, then threaten Nina and make the curly haired one beg him to spare her life. It would be interesting to see how far the kid would debase himself to save her, and then whether or not he would plead for his own life once she was dead.

  He moved toward the mouth of the alley and was about to raise the rifle to his shoulder when running steps to his left checked his stride. A policeman, young and redfaced, with a sad attempt at a mustache like a smudge of ash on his sweaty upper lip. He was running down the sidewalk, gun drawn and staring ahead at the glow at the end of the block.

  Allan stepped back into the shadows. The cop glanced into the alley after him, then ran on. Allan let out a long, slow, relieved breath.

  Too soon.

  The cop skidded to a stop and looked back, then raised his gun and started edging back toward the alley, raising his high-pitched and strident voice.

  “You in the alley,” the young cop called. “Put your weapon on the ground and kick it out where I can see it, then step out.”

  The glowing sparks had already begun their gleeful dance under the skin of his hands and forearms. The stupid little piggy was ruining his perfect moment, and now he would have to be taken care of, too. But not out on the street.

  Allan took a step back. And then another.

  * * *

  A voice rose above the moans of the bleeding homeless man, and pulled Walter’s attention back down toward the street. A young cop with a mustache was aiming his gun at the mouth of the alley on the far side, and calling for someone to come out. Walter looked into the alley and stiffened in shock. There was a man in the shadows.

  A man with a gun, backing away.

  Although the retreating man’s body was shrouded in darkness, his arms and his hands glowed as if lit from within, the mesmerizing dance of sparks reflecting in the squared lenses of familiar glasses. Walter’s heart kicked into double-time at the sight. He knew those sparks. He knew that face.

  “The killer.” Walter took a step back and stumbled into Bell. He pointed. “The Zodiac Killer. He’s there!”

  “But how?” Bell frowned, disbelieving.

  “He must have followed us!”

  Nina grabbed them both and shoved them behind the dumpster.

  “Let the cop deal with it,” she hissed. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Walter and Bell ducked down behind the metal bulk and peeked over the lip.

  “Is this it?” Bell asked, incredulous. “Is this how it ends?”

  “I hope so,” Walter replied. “Lord, I hope so.”

  “Come on,” Nina whispered. “Be a good little piggy and shoot that bastard.”

  * * *

  Allan took another step back, his teeth clenched in annoyance. Why wasn’t the cop coming into the alley? He couldn’t shoot him if he was standing out in the street.

  Why wasn’t he following?

  Then he understood. He needed to put himself into the unevolved animal mindset of the cop brain. Prey that faced him required caution. Prey that fled triggered the instinct of the chase. If Allan ran, the cop would come after him. The primitive protocols of his hindbrain would give the dumb animal no choice.

  So Allan ran, and was instantly rewarded by the sound of shouts and footsteps entering the alley and echoing after him. Predictably, the cop
had taken the bait and was following him to his doom. Allan scanned ahead of him, looking for the place to turn and fire. He couldn’t keep on luring the little piggy forever.

  “Stop,” the young pig cried. “Stop, or I’ll shoot.”

  There was a mountain of garbage bags, piled up around an overflowing dumpster. They were already primed for an avalanche. Pull one down as he went by, and the cop would be stumbling through a landslide of trash. It would be simple then to shoot him before he recovered, then finish him before anyone came to investigate.

  Suddenly Allan’s foot slipped in some foul slime dripping from the dumpster, and instead of grabbing at the mountain of garbage bags, he crashed into them. He came up again, in an instant, flailing for balance, and turned toward the office, rifle in hand.

  Blam!

  Pain flared hot in Allan’s left shoulder, and he staggered back, grunting as fear and rage melded with the pain, and transmogrified into something more than the sum of their parts. The unnatural sparks of his strange sickness melded together and blossomed out like a miniature mushroom cloud, enveloping the cop, the alley, and the buildings to either side in an eerie glittering light.

  And then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the glowing cloud was gone—and so was the cop, reduced to atoms by the radiation exploding from Allan’s body. Half the trash bags were gone, too, vaporized. The other half were on fire. The metal of the dumpster had melted like candle wax. The bricks in the walls of the buildings to either side were charred and smoking.

  Allan knelt in the center of it all, hissing through his teeth and clutching his shoulder. The pain was overwhelming, blurring his vision, numbing his mind. He forced himself to focus. He’d never been shot before. It was... illuminating. Interesting to be on the other side of things, for once.

  Now, however, was not the time to dwell on it. He had to get to safety. See to his wound. Regroup.

  “I seen you!”

  Allan looked around. There was a woman, coming out of the darkness at the far end of the alley, wearing the filthy clothes of a vagrant. The glare from a parking lot security light showed him the side of her face as she passed. It was bright red, as if she had stuck half of her head in boiling water. Her hair was smoking.

  “I seen what you done,” she shrieked. “Blew that cop up. Blew my goddamn hair right off my head. I seen you!”

  Allan ground his teeth. Another witness. This situation was becoming untenable. He had to extricate himself.

  He raised his gun.

  The woman squealed and ran. Allan pulled the trigger.

  It didn’t fire. He looked at it. All the moving parts had fused into a single gun-shaped lump of metal. He cursed and started after the woman, wincing as his shoulder wound jolted him with every step.

  The far end of the alley was blocked off by a fence, and the vagrant woman was flailing against the fence like a trapped insect, too stupid to realize that she could climb.

  Coming up behind, Allan grabbed her around her waist. She was rail thin, light as a box kite, but panic made her strong. She tried to bite Allan’s arm, but her loose, wobbly teeth fell out of her burnt and bleeding gums. The skin on her birdy little ribcage sloughed off in Allan’s grip like the skin of a boiled tomato.

  Disgusted, he threw her down on the ground and knelt on her chest, crushing her throat with one shin. She scrabbled and kicked furiously for what felt like forever, but eventually the life ran out of her and she went still beneath him.

  There was no joy for Allan in this kill. No thrill, no sparks, just a grim sense of duty, underscored by the same annoyance and resentment he’d felt when putting down that stinking bum with the ribbons in his beard.

  He had no idea how the hell things had gotten so far out of hand.

  23

  Walter rose cautiously from behind the dumpster where he and Bell and Nina had ducked when the eerie flash had happened. He looked down the alley across the street. It was dark again. There was no more unnatural light. There were no more sparks. In the murk, he couldn’t tell if the killer was still there, or if he was gone, or dead.

  He couldn’t see the cop, either.

  “Did you see it?” he asked. “Did you see what happened?”

  Beside him, Bell nodded, but didn’t seem able to speak. Nina answered for him.

  “The cop, he just vanished. He fired his gun, and the guy screamed, and that light came out of his body, and...”

  “Gamma radiation.” Bell finally found his voice. “When Iverson told us about that, I found it very hard to believe. But I have no choice but to believe the proof of my own eyes. Incredible!”

  “Maybe it was the shock of being shot,” Walter said. “Or perhaps the pain of it. Either way, his reaction caused the radiation to spike, and... my God!”

  A third of Nina’s face was as pink as rare roast beef, from her left ear to a little less than halfway across her left eye. The line of demarcation between the pale, unaffected skin and the burnt skin was mathematically perfect. He took Nina’s chin and turned the inflamed portion of her face toward Bell.

  “It’s like... like a sunburn,” he said to Bell. “And you, too. The left side of your face.”

  Bell looked back at him.

  “And you too, Walt,” Bell said. “You got it the worst out of all of us.”

  Walter reached up to touch his own face. More than three quarters of the skin felt hot and tight, sore to the touch.

  “A sunburn in the middle of the night,” Walter said, shaking his head.

  “If we had been any closer...” Nina swallowed, pale but for the pink flush of her left side. “We wouldn’t be making sunburn jokes, we’d be gathering our teeth up off the pavement.”

  Walter flinched, picturing the cop’s silhouette, vanishing like sand blown away by the wind. It was so much worse than he’d ever imagined.

  “And we may have still been too close,” Bell said. “The long-term effects of such a blast, we might not know for years. It could affect our health, our children.”

  Nina cut him off.

  “Let’s not worry about our future offspring just yet,” she said. “We don’t know if that bastard died in his own blast, or not, but we’d better make sure.”

  Bell caught her as she started toward the street.

  “If we go into that alley right now,” Bell said, “those theoretical long-term effects will happen to us in the short term. Any residual radiation would kill us in a matter of days. Skin loss, organ failure, blindness, cancer.”

  Walter nodded.

  “Iverson said the radiation remained for several hours before dissipating,” he added.

  “Yet another thing that seemed so hard to believe, at the time,” Bell said. “But now...”

  Walter looked behind him. The alley they were in ended in a cul-de-sac. He started toward the street, motioning the others to follow.

  “Come on,” he said. “We should get out of this area as quickly as possible, then warn the authorities about the radiation.”

  It took courage to walk toward the area where the blast had occurred. Even though he was reasonably certain that the radius of the lingering radiation wouldn’t extend out to the street, his skin still tingled with psychosomatic itching at the very thought of the invisible poison in the air.

  As they turned right and started for Nina’s car, shouts from down the block cut him off. He saw a young blond man in bell-bottom jeans and a bright yellow shirt turn the corner, running right down the middle of the street. He was maybe twenty-one, tops, with a sensual, girlish mouth that didn’t look like it belonged on the same face as his big shapeless nose and close-set eyes, half hidden under feathered hair.

  He had a wild panicked expression that made a lot more sense when a shouting gang of men in workman’s overalls rounded the corner behind him and started chasing after him. The young man was faster than the bigger men, but he was tottering on a pair of precarious platform shoes, and as Walter watched, the inevitable occurred.

  The blon
d man twisted his ankle in a pothole, and nearly fell. The front runner of the gang of work men, a huge, beefy but disturbingly baby-faced man with thinning black hair, caught up to the blond man, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, spinning him around and then hauling back a meaty fist.

  “You set my goddamn car on fire!” he bellowed.

  The young blond man cowered and covered up.

  “I didn’t!” he screamed. “I was just trying to get away. It’s your fault. You pushed me!”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault?” The man sneered at his cohorts “He says it’s my fault.” He turned back. “You want to know what’s your fault? This.” He laid a fist into the young man’s gut that doubled him up and sent him retching to the ground. “Don’t got much to say about that, do you?”

  “Leave him alone!” Nina called.

  She was striding toward the men, fearless, while Walter and Bell were hanging back. But before she had taken two steps, the young blond man screeched like a bird of prey and every parked car on the street exploded, as if a dozen bombs had been set off in perfect synchronization.

  Walter, Bell, and Nina fell back, crashing into the warehouse wall and shielding their faces with their arms as great billows of flame erupted from the gas tanks of the cars, and bits of shrapnel pinged off the bricks around them.

  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.”