Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (12 page)

In the middle of the group, the old black woman in the red coat was laughing with the rest, gesturing at the flat tire with her cane.

Linda’s grandma.

She was all right.

Walter’s heart lurched as he watched her, and he had to fight back tears.

“She doesn’t even know what almost happened,” he said, half to himself. “None of them know.”

Bell put his hand on his shoulder.

“And we certainly aren’t going to tell them.” He looked past Walter and out the window at the crippled bus. “We’re going to leave it be, aren’t we? Let them all have whatever lives they were meant to live before we...”

Before Bell could finish, Nina cut him off, speaking between clenched teeth.

“Boys.”

Bell’s head snapped around.

“What?” He frowned. “What is it?”

Nina was scanning the room again, shoulders tense and eyes gone hard and hyper-vigilant.

“If your gunman isn’t here,” she said, voice low and constricted, “And he couldn’t have gotten out without passing us, then...”

“You’re not police.”

The new voice came from the doorway, flat and dull as the concrete floor. They turned. A man was standing there. Stocky, sturdily built, with an unremarkable yet familiar face.

He was aiming a rifle at them.

Walter blinked. The killer must have gone up to the fourth floor, then waited to see who they were. Clever, and frighteningly calm.

“What do you...”

He cut off abruptly, his bespectacled gaze flicking wide-eyed between Walter and Bell, Bell and Walter. His calm faltering for a critical second.

“It’s you,” he said, voice barely more than a breath.

As he hesitated, to Walter and Bell’s stunned surprise, Nina pulled a small handgun from her fringed suede purse and drew a bead on the killer.

“Drop it,” she hissed.

“Well,” the man replied, flashing a thin reptilian smile like a cut throat. “This
is
an interesting development.” He made no move to lower the rifle, aiming right between Walter’s eyes. “I never would have guessed that the bitch would turn out to be the one with the balls. What do you say, Annie Oakley? Think you’ve got balls enough to shoot me in cold blood before I pull the trigger on your boyfriend?

“Or...” He shifted his aim to Bell. “Is
this
your boyfriend?”

Nina gaze shifted from the killer to Bell and back again. There was a gloss of sweat on her quivering upper lip. Walter was desperate to do something, say something, anything—but his whole body felt frozen, throat clenched tight as a fist.

“Eenie, meenie, miney, moe.” The killer was chanting, shifting from Walter to Bell and back again. “Catch a hippie by his toe. If he hollers let him go. Eenie, meenie, miney...”

Instead of saying
moe
, he made a lightning fast lunge toward Nina, gracefully sidestepping her gun hand and whacking her above the ear with the butt of his rifle. Nina sagged bonelessly to the floor, gun skittering away across the concrete.

Anger swiftly overcame Walter’s fear and natural disinclination to violence, and he launched himself forward, arms flailing. Bell followed him in, trying to pin the stranger’s arms and prevent him from shooting Nina where she lay.

Their desperate and poorly coordinated attacks failed. The killer was as strong and precise as they were weak and uncertain. He kicked Bell in the chest, sending him crashing into the wall, then knocked Walter’s strikes away with the gun butt and punched him in the face.

Walter had never been punched in the face in his life. He’d never even been slapped. The shocking impact of it jarred his skull, short-circuiting his thought process and filling his eyes with blinding tears. Then the hot wave of pain washed over him and his legs buckled, the world black and spinning.

Still he managed to grab at the killer’s shirt, clawing at him, trying to drag him down.

“Walter!”

Bell lunged in again, and the killer shoved Walter away, spinning to face him. Walter hit the unforgiving concrete in a cloud of dust and something cracked him across the face, precisely where the stranger had hit him before.

The rifle. It was lying across his chest. Somehow he had managed to come away with it as the killer had turned.

Bell slammed down beside him, raising more dust, and the killer turned back to Walter, reaching for the rifle. Nina rolled and grabbed the killer, locking her fingers around one of his booted ankles.

“Shoot him, Walter!” she screamed. “Shoot him!”

Walter crabbed back toward the door and staggered up as the killer drove his heel into Nina’s mouth.

He trained the rifle on the killer.

The killer held out his hand.

“Give it to me,” he said.

Walter swallowed, dry throat clicking and clenching on nothing as he edged back, finger on the trigger. In that moment, even when confronting a ruthless killer, Walter was ashamed to find himself hesitating. He had never fired a gun, let alone had a reason to take a life, and he hoped to live out the rest of his natural days without ever doing so.

Even if he could find the courage to pull the trigger, and got lucky enough to hit his target, would the man go down? He looked so calm, so completely without fear, that Walter wondered if he might somehow be invulnerable. Or perhaps he could read Walter’s mind.

Perhaps he knew.

Well, there’s only one way to find out.

Walter sucked up a little half-swallowed sound he hoped wasn’t really a whimper, and backpedaled into the stairwell. He turned to the rail, then dropped the rifle down the well in the center of the stairs.

A solid body smashed into him, pushing him against the handrail, crushing his ribs. Hard knuckles punched him in the back of the head. The world turned to blur and static, but a voice cut through it, hissing in his ear.

“Smart,” it said. “I’ll give you that. Too bad it won’t be enough.”

Then Walter slumped back onto the cold metal floor of the landing, wincing and wheezing as footsteps rang away down the stairs, fast and steady. A moment later— at least it might have been a moment, it was hard to tell— fuzzy black shapes filled the door to the third floor and he heard a gruff curse from a familiar voice.

“Walter. Are you alright?”

The fuzzy shapes came closer, and knelt beside him. It was Bell and Nina. Nina had retrieved her gun but she looked terrible, with a long gash on her forehead and a split lip that had bled down to her chin.

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.

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?”