Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

“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.

10

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?”