Fringe - the Zodiac Paradox (21 page)

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 blond 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.”

“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.

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 making 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.