Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

by Christa Faust

  From behind and above, Latimer’s voice squawked through the megaphone again.

  “No point in running, Bishop! Bell! We know where you live. We know where you work. You’ve got no place to go. All you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable!”

  “Just keep going,” Nina hissed.

  Walter was panting like a dog, his heart hammering. The running. The panic. It was too much. He didn’t think he could take it anymore.

  Nina slid down an embankment and stumbled on ahead. Walter and Bell crashed down after her, clinging to each other to keep from falling. When they reached the bottom, teetering and pinwheeling their arms for balance, an agent stepped out from behind a tree, flicking on a flashlight, his gun drawn.

  He was surprisingly young, with lots of fluffy blond hair that vigorously defied whatever grooming products he’d used to try and tame it, but his face was cold and serious.

  “Drop your weapons,” he said, tipping his chin at Nina’s pistol.

  They were caught. Their backs were against the U-shaped embankment they’d just tumbled down, and the only way out was past the agent.

  33

  Nina let her gun drop to the leafy forest floor and slowly raised her hands. Walter felt a terrible desperation welling up like bile in his throat as he thought of Miranda, the usherette at the theater who would die in less than two hours if they couldn’t get to her first.

  There was a quick blur of movement between the trees. The blond agent crumpled first to his knees, then awkwardly to his side.

  Behind him was the shadowy form of Special Agent Iverson, trench coat flapping open and a gun held butt-first in his right hand. He knelt beside his pistol-whipped associate and checked his vitals.

  “He’ll be fine,” Iverson said. “Go on.”

  “Thanks!” Walter said. “How can we ever repay you for saving us again?”

  “You want to repay me?” he asked. “Whatever you do, don’t let Latimer capture the Zodiac. He’s become obsessed, and can’t be reasoned with. He thinks Zodiac is the ultimate nuclear weapon, and all he cares about is controlling him. It’s up to you three to prevent it.”

  The fallen agent groaned, eyelids fluttering as he struggled to regain consciousness.

  “Now go. Run!”

  The enormity of what Iverson was saying barely had time to sink in before Nina grabbed Walter’s hand and pulled him away.

  “You heard the man,” she said. “Come on, Walter. Run! We’re almost there.”

  A moment later, Walter could hear Iverson’s voice up above.

  “They have another accomplice!” he cried. “Caucasian male, thirties, about six one and bald, with a beard. I saw him sap Davis, and then the four of them ran off, that way!”

  There were more agents thundering through the trees, but farther back and up the slope to the left, misled by Iverson’s ruse. Walter lurched after Nina and Bell, chest heaving, as they dodged through a thick stand of young elms. He saw something dark ahead of them, beyond the trees, which quickly resolved itself into the blackened timbers and tar paper walls of the ruined shack. The nose of the rented car stuck out from behind its far corner.

  They ran to it, hopping over charred debris, opened the doors and threw themselves in, Nina and Bell in front and Walter in back. Nina jammed the key into the ignition and cranked it.

  The big V8 roared to life.

  She dropped the shift into drive and stomped on the gas. It was too much. The tires spun in the leaf mold and mud, going nowhere.

  Two agents were crashing through the elms. Walter could tell by the glint of moonlight that they had guns out.

  “Easy,” Bell said.

  “I got it,” Nina said. “Got it.”

  She let up on the accelerator and tried again, more slowly this time. The wheels caught. They were rolling.

  An agent grabbed at the car, catching a side-view mirror and smacking the driver’s side window with the butt of his gun, starring it. Nina sped up, roaring down the narrow track, and the agent let go as a tree threatened to scrape him off. The other agent skidded to a stop behind them and fired.

  Walter and Bell ducked, but Walter heard no impact, and the next second they had taken a curve. The agents were out of sight.

  “Not out of the woods yet,” Nina muttered.

  Walter frowned, thinking it a very obvious thing to say, then realized that she meant it metaphorically.

  “Those guys are going to catch us in a matter of minutes,” she said, “if we don’t find some way to slow them down.”

  The paved road appeared ahead of them. Nina swerved out onto it in a spray of gravel, then rocked back into line and sped down the hill. Walter looked behind. He couldn’t see anything at first, but then he could. Headlights raced under the trees, reaching out for them.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  Nina barreled down the gravel road at a terrifying speed. This was no Volkswagen Beetle, but she didn’t seem intimidated by the Detroit behemoth, and slung it along the twisting track with an admirable—if heart-stopping—fearlessness.

  At last they came to the state highway. Nina bumped up onto it without braking, then roared west with her foot pinned to the floorboard. The highway was smooth and clean, but almost as twisty as the smaller road. They were screeching around the curves.

  “This is where they’ll catch us,” she said.

  “Then what do we do?” Walter asked. “What’s the point of running?”

  “For a scientist,” she replied. “You have very little imagination.”

  Another dirt road was coming up rapidly on the left side of the road. Nina glanced in her rearview mirror, then swerved toward it, killing the LeSabre’s headlights. Bell hung on with both hands. Walter grabbed the door handle and looked back. The FBI cars still were out of sight behind the curve of the highway.

  The big car slammed down onto the dark dirt road at speed, almost smashing Nina’s head into the ceiling as the jolt sent her bouncing out of her seat. She drove forward about ten yards then hit the brakes and skidded to a stop in the muddy gravel.

  She, Bell, and Walter looked back. A narrow sliver of the highway was just visible through the trees. One second. Two seconds. Three. Two sets of headlights howled by, and then two seconds later, a third.

  “Is that all of them?” Bell asked. “How many were there?”

  “I didn’t see,” Nina said. “But if there are any more, they’re probably still up at the cabin, trying to catch Roscoe and the boys. Time to go.”

  She turned the headlights back on, put the LeSabre in reverse, and backed out of the side road onto the highway. But instead of going east, she went west.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” said Bell. “The connector to the Five is west.”

  “They’re going to turn around eventually, William. I don’t want to be behind them when they do. We’ll take the 101 back.”

  “Didn’t you say that took longer?” Walter asked. “We need to get back to San Francisco as soon as possible.”

  “That’s okay,” she replied. “I’ll just go faster.”

  Walter exchanged a look with Bell, then put his seatbelt on. It was going to be a long trip.

  34

  Miranda was wrapping up her shift at the Roxie, sweeping cigarette butts and scattered popcorn out from under the seats and turning out the lights inside the candy display cases. She tossed out the last of the sad, mummified hot dogs that had been spinning on the hot rollers all day, and wiped down all the spigots on the soft-drink dispensers.

  It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it certainly wasn’t the worst, and she got to see all the movies for free. She’d proved herself to be so reliable that she’d been given a set of keys, and the added responsibility of locking up every Monday night. She took that responsibility very seriously.

  Monday nights were usually pretty dead, anyway. They were closed on Tuesday, and Wednesday was when they changed the feature, so by Monday night, pretty much everyone already had th
e current film.

  Besides, who goes to the movies on Monday night?

  This past week they’d been running this French animated film called Fantastic Planet, which she had to admit she didn’t really understand. Clearly she wasn’t the only one, since it hadn’t been very popular, and this last late show had been nearly empty—except for a young couple who were way more into each other than the movie. And that same creepy guy with the glasses who’d come in alone every Monday night for the past month.

  For some reason, that guy had left early, twenty minutes before the end of the movie, and Miranda wasn’t sorry to see him go. She always had the feeling that he was watching her when she wasn’t looking.

  As she reached into her purse to get the keys to lock up the theater, her fingers brushed against a bottle of Miss Clairol Born Blonde hair bleach. She’d been carrying it in her purse for a full week now, trying to get up the nerve to use it. On her way through the lobby, she paused to look at her own reflection in the mirror behind the candy counter.

  Skinny, no kind of body at all beneath her polyester uniform. Freckles. Stick-straight brown hair. Such a blah-bland Breck girl. No wonder Matt barely even noticed that she existed.

  Matt MacIntyre was the shift manager. He was twenty-five, and knew every single movie ever made. He had a bleach-blond shag haircut and an earring in one ear. He liked Ziggy Stardust and the New York Dolls, and made all his own clothes, or bought them from thrift stores and ripped them up, embellished them, and remade them so they looked way cooler than anything you could buy in the trendy boutiques.

  She once complimented him on a purple scarf he was wearing and he’d smiled and wrapped it around her neck, telling her she could have it, that it matched her “Liz Taylor eyes.” That had been the best day of her entire life.

  She wore that scarf every single day, and when it stopped smelling like him, she’d gone over to the Liberty House department store at Union Square and secretly doused it with the spicy cologne he wore—Halston Z-14 for Men.

  When she went home, she wrapped that fragrant scarf around her face and listened to “Bad Girl” by the New York Dolls, over and over again, imagining that she was that bad girl in the song. The kind of girl that guys would beg to be with. A tough, sassy blonde, with glitter eye shadow and platform shoes, and attitude to spare.

  The kind of girl that Matt would notice.

  But every time she’d take that bottle of bleach out of her purse and set it on the edge of the sink, she’d chicken out at the last minute. What if it didn’t come out right? What if she ended up looking stupid, like Rita Bianchini back in eight grade, who’d tried to dye her black hair blond and turned it a terrible frizzy orange. Rita had to wear a hat for the whole rest of the year, and everyone teased her mercilessly about it. Miranda couldn’t take that kind of humiliation.

  As she left the theater, walking alone down 16th Street toward Hoff, she decided that it was time to take the plunge. No more girly indecisiveness. She would bleach her hair that night, as soon as she got home. Of course, her mom would flip out, but so what? She was a grown woman now, just turned eighteen and ready to move out of her parents’ suburban house and find her own apartment in the city.

  It was time for her to be her own person. She’d been a good girl for way too long.

  Miranda was ready to be bad.

  * * *

  The ride back was a nightmare.

  Nina drove like a maniac, flooring it the whole way, and Walter sat rigid in his seat, afraid at every second that she would wreck the car, or kill somebody, or attract the attention of the police. And he didn’t understand why she was trying. There was no way they were going to make it. It was too far, and there wasn’t nearly enough time.

  Then, as they neared the city and he checked his watch, the nightmare got worse, because somehow she had managed it. She had driven so fast that the theater was within reach. As they came off the Golden Gate Bridge and started south into the steep hills of Divisadero Street they still had thirty minutes to spare.

  That’s when they hit some kind of traffic jam that had everything snarled up for as far as they could see. Walter’s fingers dug into the seat as they crawled through the Fillmore district. Nina leapt at gaps, jerking the big car forward one second, then stomping on the brakes the next. But there was no point. There was nowhere to go.

  Ten minutes later, they were only at Haight Street. And a few blocks later, when they turned left on 16 th, it got even worse, as a large multi-car accident was revealed at the intersection with Market.

  He checked his watch as they inched past the pile-up and headed into the Mission District. Two minutes. Maybe the killer would be late. Maybe the girl wouldn’t show up. Maybe they would make all the lights and get there on time.

  But four minutes later the bright marquee of the Roxie came into view. Nina pulled up in front and Walter jumped out of the back seat before the car had come to a complete stop, stumbling and catching himself at the last minute as he ran to the glass doors.

  Locked.

  He banged on the door, cupping his hands to peer inside, but he didn’t see anyone.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hello!”

  Nothing. No response. They must have just missed her.

  Walter ran back to the car and dove into the back seat, rifling through the file for his translation of that last page of the Zodiac’s notebook.

  “...she parks her car on Hoff Street,” Walter read out loud. “Where the hell is Hoff Street?”

  “There,” Nina said, pointing through the windshield and stomping on the gas, cutting off a honking Dodge Dart. “Just a few blocks down.”

  “For God’s sake,” Walter said. “Hurry.”

  * * *

  When Miranda turned down Hoff, a sudden cold wind whipped the ends of Matt’s purple scarf up into her face. She clutched it tighter around her neck and quickened her step, making a beeline for the parking lot where she kept the hated Honda CVCC she’d received for her birthday, instead of the cute Beetle she’d wanted.

  “So much more practical,” her father had said. “And better gas mileage. Next time OPEC pulls another oil embargo, you’ll thank me.”

  Which pretty much summed up the entire 18 years of her life so far. Practical. Carefully thought out in advance. She was so ready to break out of that expectation. To be extravagant and wild. To hell with oil embargos.

  She had her hand half raised to wave at Dio, the friendly parking lot attendant, but when she looked over at the little booth where he always sat, she was surprised to see that it was empty, the door left hanging open. Maybe he’d gone to the bathroom or something, but it seemed kind of weird that he would just leave the door open like that.

  She took a step closer, frowning.

  Inside the booth, Dio’s little portable heater was running at the foot of the stool he sat on. His transistor radio played the crackly religious station he always listened to. There was a half-eaten Zagnut bar sitting on top of the radio. A faded snapshot of Dio’s five daughters had fallen off the shelf and landed against the grate of the little heater, dangerously close to the glowing coils within.

  She figured that she’d better move that photo before it caught on fire, and was bending down and reaching toward it when she noticed the blood.

  There was a small red smear, about the size of a man’s shoe, on the floor to the left of the stool. Could have been anything, ketchup or maybe raspberry jam, but it was enough to turn Miranda’s own blood to ice.

  She backpedalled, heart racing and thinking that she ought to try to call the police or something, but the nearest pay phone was two blocks back on 16 th’ and she was only a few feet away from her car.

  The lot looked empty. No one was passing by on the street.

  She should get in her car and get away, right away. Then she could maybe stop at a gas station and call the police. That was the sensible thing to do, and despite her fantasies to the contrary, Miranda had been raised to be a sensible girl.

/>   Rooting through her overstuffed purse for her car keys, she walked around her little white Honda to the driver’s side.

  There she found Dio.

  He was dead, that much was clear, slumped up against her car as if propped there like a rag doll, ready for a tea party. His neat white shirt and navy blue uniform jacket were soaked with blood, but that wasn’t the worst thing about him. The worst thing about it was his face.

  He didn’t have one.

  Where his face should have been was a charred red crater lit from within by a strange pale glow emanating from a network of fissures in the red ruin that used to be his features.

  Then she quickly realized that it wasn’t the worst thing after all. The real worst thing was the note.

  A handwritten note, stuck to the center of his chest with a small folding pocket knife.

  HELLO MIRANDA

  Her purse fell from her numb, shaking hands, spilling its contents across the asphalt as she stood, frozen in horror. That’s when she started to notice her lips tingling unpleasantly, a weird itchy feeling that spread deep into her gums and tongue. There was a sensation sort of like heat radiating from the faceless corpse, causing her skin to tighten and pulse all along the front of her body.

  That’s when a hand clamped down over her mouth. A large, calloused hand crawling with sparks. The sparks leapt from his fingers and burrowed like hungry maggots into her tingling skin, burning trails of excruciating agony deep into the meat of her cheeks.

  She screamed against the muffing hand, but the sound was reduced to an impotent squeak. Then the fat blade of a large hunting knife appeared before her tear-blurred eyes. The terrible sparks flashed and reflected in the blade, then the knife buried itself in her vulnerable throat.

  * * *

  When Nina turned into the parking lot, she slammed on the breaks so hard that Walter banged into the back of Bell’s seat.

  “Look,” she said.

  In the pool of yellow cast by their headlights, Walter could see a pair of thin female legs in tan pantyhose, sticking out from behind a white Honda CVCC. One shoe was off, lying a few feet away.