Christa Faust - Fringe The Zodiac Paradox

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.